Unprofessional Musicians
- Professionals stop rehearsals on time and I am patient with that.
- They only do music that advances their careers.
- I never set any criteria for success. In other words, I've never been tempted to call myself a failure if I have not achieved this or that by a certain age.
- I never waited for the phone to ring. I made my own opportunites and in doing so I made opportunities for others.
- I played music by unpopular composers.
One of the most daring composers I took on was James Park. He died last year.
I keep coming back to his "Song In....", a series of guitar solos, musical reflecitons of Adirondack fishing.
I am not a fisherman, except in my mind when I hear these guitar solos.
He probes the waters; the music takes on its steady current. In those waters are mysterious agents, wiry silver and unkowable, but revealed somewhat when they're landed. Fishing is all mixed up with Melusine and the under water battle in Ziguezon.
His lure: let's say they are his sweet opening phrases, too sweet for some. They drove people away when some of us first encountered his music in the 80s. Modernistbane.
And yet his sweet opening progress stealthily into some brilliant chromatic moves -- bizarre harmonic fish that are absolutely unique. Try to find anything like them elsewhere. He forms bizarre linkages around his cosy, bürgerlich river landscapes. These moves feel capricious. He was unprofessional enough to have no regard for adopting any publicly traded rehetorical frameworks for his bizarre chromaticisms. He's not alone there. It's something he shares with avant garde composers.
His B-roll is the lovely diatonic water and the surrounding landscape. His A-roll is the bizarre chromaticism -- strange fish. So bizarre we cannot figure out what to do with them, so we eat them.
I have come to feel that classical music orders the A-roll and B-roll into normalized or conventionalized relationships. James Park is Baroque, not interested in ironing out the caprice.
The ending of Early Morning Run -- the tune descends a 5th, then that same 5th is embedded in the last chord.
"Brown Study"
Jamie said, "my wife & I always knew what a brown study was". That's a funny thing to say. Park was a medievalist, seen in his treatment of Laily Worm.
In 1532 someone noted that a "lack of company will soon lead a man into a brown study". The unprofessional composer is a maverick and also a loner. It's understandable -- the lonliness will lead to a brown study and "intense interiority"
There is a stunning move in Park's Brown Study, and some bizarre aspects of its setup and aftermath.
Flint Hill Evensong
He could hear the bells of his Episcopalean Church from his place, known as "Flint Hill". His wife trained fox houds for the hunt in surrounding horse country. The hunt became controversial, and Jamie Park's wife is mentioned in this NY Times piece.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey